Friday, December 9, 2016

LawBitRage: Since their inception, Bitcoin exchanges have operated under a fog of legal uncertainty. Last week, just one day after the New York-based exchange itBit announced obtaining a banking law charter giving it the ability to operate in all 50 states, a California official called that into question. Almost every state has its own licensing requirements for traditional money transmitters that include payment processors and money transfer firms like Western Union. The safe but costly route for Bitcoin exchanges would be to obtain a license in each state that requires it for digital currency firms. But it's unclear which do.Texas, for example, stated that transmitting digital currencies like bitcoin doesn't require a license in its state. Other states, like New York and California, are still in the midst of passing digital currency-specific licensing requirements, making it a question of what Bitcoin exchanges should do until those licensing laws are finalized. The prominent and reputable Bitcoin exchange Coinbase, for example, was operating in New York and California without a license in either state—and probably didn't need one.

Trading pit does not clear accounts, it is really a database manager. It can exchange virtual coins by bet compression. The money transmitter laws refer to bank clearing houses, but the entire secure card network is strictly symmetrical peer to peer. Individual secure cards in fact have the ability to exchange coins, acting as an exchange. It has the same spreadsheet function as used by the trading pit, just variations of a windowing Huffman encoder.

In cases where the owner of a pit generates income from incidental ads makes him a non-participant in the capital requirement, he cannot be regulated until ads are regulated. If the issue is provisional cash (read bit error) then I guess government can grab that line of code and look at it, or demand it be verified. But that is what all the traders want anyway.